There are
slight regional variations in formal written English in the
United
Kingdom (for example, although the words wee and little are
interchangeable in some contexts, one is more likely to see
wee written by someone from northern Britain (and especially Scotland) or from Northern
Ireland than by someone from Southern England or Wales).
Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in
written English within the United Kingdom, and this could
be described as "British English". The forms of spoken
English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas
of the world where English is spoken, and a uniform concept of
"British English" is therefore more difficult to apply to the
spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide
to World English (p. 45), "[f]or many people...especially
in England [the phrase British English] is tautologous," and it shares "all the
ambiguities and tensions in the word British, and as a result can
be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly,
within a range of blurring and ambiguity".

History

English is a West Germanic language that
originated from the Anglo-Frisiandialects brought to England by Germanic settlers from various parts of what
is now northwest Germany and the
northern Netherlands. Initially, Old
English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied
origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of
England. One of these dialects, Late
West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then
influenced by two waves of invasion; The first was by language
speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family; they
conquered and colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th
centuries. The second was the Normans in the
11th century, who spoke Old Norman and
ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. These two invasions
caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was
never a truly mixed language in the
strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the
cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a
hybrid tongue for basic communication).

Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant
grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the
later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core
of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the
European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely
through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a
"borrowing" language of great flexibility
and with a huge vocabulary.

The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in
England, which comprises Southern English dialects, Midlands English dialects and Northern English dialects), Welsh English, and Scottish English (not to be confused with
the Scots language). The various
British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed
from other languages. The Scottish and Northern English dialects
include many words originally borrowed from Old Norse and a few borrowed from Gaelic, though most of the structure
and common words are conservative Anglo-Saxon, hence 'kirk'
(church), 'beck' (stream), 'feart' (feared), 'fell' (hillside),
'kistie' (chest, box), 'lang syne' (long ago) etc.

Johnson's team are sifting through a large collection of examples
of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices
project" run by the BBC, in which they invited
the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout
the country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news
articles about how the British speak English from swearing through
to items on language schools. This information will also be
collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for
where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the
Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever,
despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other
accents and dialects through TV and radio." Work by the team on
this project is not expected to end before 2010. When covering the
award of the grant on 1 June 2007, The
Independent stated:

Accent

There is no singular British accent; in fact, the United Kingdom is
home to a wide variety of regional accents and dialects, to a
greater extent than the United States.

Regional

The form of English most commonly associated with the upper class in the southern counties of England
is called Received
Pronunciation (RP). It derives from a mixture of the Midland
and Southern dialects which were spoken in London during the Middle
Ages and is frequently used as a model for teaching English to
foreign learners. Although speakers from elsewhere within the UK
may not speak with an RP accent it is now a class-dialect more than
a local dialect. It may also be referred to as "the Queen's (or
King's) English", "Public
School English", or "BBC English" as this
was originally the form of English used on radio and television,
although a wider variety of accents can be heard these days. Only
approximately two percent of Britons speak RP, and it has evolved
quite markedly over the last 40 years.

Even in the South East there are significantly different accents;
the London Cockney accent is strikingly
different from RP and its rhyming
slang can be difficult for outsiders to understand. In the
South Eastern county of Surrey, where RP is prevalent, closer to
London it approaches Cockney, further south it becomes more rural,
and this continues through Sussex and Hampshire where the accents
and language are even more rustic. In fact the accents and dialect
of the south coast can range from the classic South Eastern RP
through rustic to increasing an West Country accent as one passes
through Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, Devon and finally into the
Celtic county of Cornwall, where the West Country has come as close
to the Welsh accent as to that of any English county.

Estuary English has been gaining
prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some
of Cockney. In London itself, the broad local accent is still
changing, partly influenced by Caribbean speech. Communities
migrating to the UK in recent decades have brought many more
languages to the country. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education
Authority discovered over 100 languages being spoken
domestically by the families of the inner city's school children.
As a result, Londoners speak with a mixture
of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age,
upbringing, and sundry other factors.

Since the
mass immigration to Northamptonshire in the 1940s and its close accent borders, it has
become a source of various accent developments.There, nowadays, one
finds an accent known locally as the Kettering accent, which is a mixture of many different local
accents, including East Midlands,
East
Anglian, Scottish, and
Cockney.In addition, in the
town of Corby, five miles
(8 km) north, one can find Corbyite, which unlike the
Kettering accent, is largely based on Scottish. This is due
to the influx of Scottish steelworkers.

Outside the southeast there are, in England alone, other families
of accents easily distinguished by natives, including:

Although some of the stronger regional accents may sometimes be
difficult for some anglophones from outside Britain to understand,
almost all "British English" accents are mutually intelligible amongst the
British themselves, with only occasional difficulty between very
diverse accents. However, modern communications and mass media have
reduced these differences significantly. In addition, most British
people can to some degree temporarily 'swing' their accent towards
a more neutral form of English at will, to reduce difficulty where
very different accents are involved, or when speaking to
foreigners. This phenomenon is known in linguistics as code shifting.

For
historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the 9th
century, the form of language spoken in London and the East Midlands became standard English within
the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted
use in the law, government, literature and education within
Britain. Largely, modern British spelling was standardised
in Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English
Language (1755), although previous writers had also played
a significant role in this and much has changed since 1755.
Scotland, which underwent parliamentary union with England only in
1707 (and devolved in 1998), still has a few independent aspects of
standardisation, especially within its autonomous legal
system.

Since the early 20th century, numerous books by British authors
intended as guides to English grammar and usage have been
published, a few of which have achieved sufficient acclaim to have
remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new
editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all,
Fowler's Modern
English Usage and The
Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest
Gowers. Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British
English for publication is included in style guides issued by
various publishers including The Times
newspaper, the Oxford University
Press and the Cambridge
University Press, and others. The Oxford University Press
guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by
Horace Henry Hart and were, at the time
(1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were
gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules and, most recently (in 2002), as
part of The Oxford Manual of Style. Comparable in
authority and stature to The
Chicago Manual of Style for published American English, the
Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British
English, to which writers can turn in the absence of any specific
document issued by the publishing house that will publish their
work.

Notes

a. In British English collective nouns may be treated as either
singular or plural, according to context. An example provided by
Partridge is: " 'The committee of
public safety is to consider the matter', but 'the committee of
public safety quarrel as to who its next chairman should be'
...Thus...singular when...a unit is intended; plural when the idea
of plurality is predominant." BBC television
news and The Guardian style guide follow
Partridge but other sources, such as BBC
Online and The Times style guides, recommend a strict
noun-verb agreement with the collective noun always governing the
verb conjugated in the
singular. BBC radio news, however, insists on the plural verb.
Partridge, Eric (1947) Usage and Abusage: "Collective
Nouns". Allen, John (2003) BBC News style guide, page 31.

Peters, p 79.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines
British English as "the English language as spoken or
written in the British Isles; esp[ecially] the forms of English
usual in Great
Britain, as contrasted with those characteristic of the U.S.A.
or other English-speaking countries."